Professional Documents
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Cacti 102
Cacti 102
Monitoring
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Introduction
Data Collection
– Supports SNMP including the use of php-snmp or net-snmp
– Data sources can be updated via SNMP or by defining scripts to
capture required data.
– An optional component, cactid, implements SNMP routines in C with
multi-threading. Critical for very large installations.
Templates
– You can create templates to reutilize graphics definitions, data and
device sources
Cacti Plugin Architecture
– Extends Cacti functionality. Many, many plugins are available.
User Management
– You can manage users locally or via LDAP and you can assign
granular levels of authorization by user or groups of users.
Disadvantages
Configuration of Interfaces is Tedious
– The first time you add an interfaces, add graphics for each interface
and place these graphics correctly on a hierarchical menu requires
considerable time and effort.
– It’s very important that you keep your Cacti configuration up-to-date
with your network. You must either assign someone to do this, or
create appropriate scripts and data shares for this purpose.
– If you make a configuration error it can be tedious to correct it.
Configuration of Plugin Architecture is non-trivial
– Plugin Architecture (PA) versions are released based on specific
Cacti versions.
– Installing the PA with packaged Cacti versions can be hard.
– Upgrading Cacti if you have installed the PA can be hard.
http://pcN.ws.nsrc.org/cacti
Press “Finish”
Note!
Be sure that “RRDTool 1.2.x”
(or higher) is chosen and not
“1.0.x”.
Cacti: First Time Login
You’ll see this screen later when you are creating graphics for hosts vs. routers
View the Graphics
Second, name your tree, choose the sorting order (the author
likes Natural Sorting and press “create”:
Graphics Tree
Third, add devices to your new tree:
Once you click “Add” you can add “Headers” (separators), graphs or
hosts. Now we'll add Hosts to our newly created graph tree:
Graphics Tree with 2 Devices
• Our graphics tree just after the first two devices were added.
• So far, no graphics are displayed – the first graphics can
take up to 5 minutes to display.
• Cacti graphs are stored on disk and updated using RRDTool
via the poller.php script, which, by default, is run every five
minutes using cron.
Initial Graphs
Over time you’ll see tendencies
Next Steps
• You can extend cacti by installing the Cacti Plugin
Architecture:
http://cactiusers.org/wiki/PluginArchitectureInstall
• There are a number of popular Cacti plugins, such as:
- Settings
- thold
- PHP Weathermap
- Syslog-NG
• A good place to start is http://cactiusers.net/ and Google.
• To send email to RT from Cacti via rt-mailgate you can
use the Cacti “settings” plugin:
http://docs.cacti.net/plugin:settings
Conclusions
Your Mission...
– Create device entries in Cacti for every router
– Create device entries in Cacti for each server
– Create device entries for any additional network
equipment in the classroom. Use SNMP for all items.
– Create graphs for each item.
– Place PCs, Routers, Switches in a tree hierarchy of
your design.
This is tedious and you may wish to only create entries for
a subset of items in the classroom. Use the Network
Diagram on the class wiki as a reference.
References